


Why Are They So Loud?

by Mattie24601



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: F/F, Guns, Panic Attacks, Polyamory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-04
Updated: 2016-12-04
Packaged: 2018-09-06 12:57:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,071
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8752474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mattie24601/pseuds/Mattie24601
Summary: Felicity hasn't like guns for as long as she can remember. Here are some of her reactions to her interactions with them.
*Updated 1/25/18*





	

**Author's Note:**

> As someone mentioned in the comments, Felicity is Jewish. I wrote this story before deciding on a character from which to have the POV. So I apologize for making that scene seem out of character.

The first time she hears a gun go off she jumps. The noise is too loud, she doesn’t like it. She’s at a gun range so she doesn’t say anything. Sara is the one who brings her. Somehow she gets talked into shooting a pistol, by the end of it she’s in tears and having a hard time breathing. Guns terrify her, how much damage they can do, the fact that they can be hidden so easily. She jumps when everyone else’s guns go off in her group, even with the headphones the noise is too loud. Most of her bullets don’t even hit the target. Sara is in the group that goes after her, Sara doesn’t know how it affects her until after she’s done. Sara holds her until she has calmed down.

A couple months later Sara and Nyssa are watching a military movie when they invite her to join them. The movie is about a genocide in a small African country. She doesn’t know why she stays. She’s on the verge of a panic attack before the other two notice something is wrong. There are too many guns, too many people dying. It’s all the machetes, though, that fall out of the back of the truck that sends her over the edge. They turn off the movie, and cuddle around her. Their arms wrap around her before asking if she wants to go to bed. She nods, on the verge of tears, and tries to calm herself down. Later they watch a different movie about the Holocaust. She doesn’t panic this time. She’s not sure if it’s because it’s in black and white or because most of the deaths aren’t by the guns but by the gas chambers.

She’s not sure when she first realized that she was afraid of guns. She remembers that one time when she was younger, 8 or 9, and she played hide and seek with her friend, she crawled into her mom’s closet and found 2 shotguns or maybe rifles. She asked her mom about them, she’s told that they are her grandfather’s from World War II. They have no ammo or gun powder. They still scare her though, she avoids going into her mother’s closet for about a year after.

Sara doesn’t really understand her fear. Why would she, she grew up with a cop for a father. Nyssa doesn’t either. They don’t need to though, they still protect her no matter what. Sara follows her father’s footsteps and also becomes a cop. She doesn’t like it at first but Sara keeps her guns locked up separate from the ammo and gun powder like it should be. Sara understands where her fear comes from, even Nyssa is worried for her. They both worry that Sara will get injured or killed working but it’s what she loves. Nyssa also works in law enforcement but she works as a detective, after everyone has already left the scene. She prefers to work behind the scenes in forensics, staying behind her computer screen. She finds it funny how all three of them work at the same place.

She wakes up from a nightmare one night. Some kids have been kidnapped, she helps them escape but then the kidnapper comes after all of them with a gun. It’s recurring but she doesn’t tell Sara or Nyssa. She knows that they both have worse nightmares from their time on the force. They’ve seen worse things. They wake up thrashing or screaming, she only breathes heavier, it doesn’t wake them up. She knows that they would want to know, but she can’t tell them.

One time she’s at school during a real lockdown. She’s taking a test online and the teacher won’t let any of them get their phones from their bags. Thankfully she’s in a room with no windows. The teacher can’t or won’t tell them what’s wrong. About 15 minutes in they all realize they still have their laptops and someone looks up what’s happening. A note was found in the bathroom saying someone was going to shoot up the school. Several students saw the note before anyone reported it. The thing that kept her the most calm that day was the fact that they never heard any loud noises. Most of the students in her class were either on news sites reading the story or watching the live feed. About and hour in one kid’s phone went off and the teacher made him put his phone back in his bag after he turned it off. She wasn’t sure why he didn’t just talk to his parents who clearly were the ones calling him. Later when she got her phone back she found about 100 messages from her friends, all talking to each other and worried about her because she wasn’t answering, all knowing about her fear of guns. None of the texts were from her mother who didn’t even know about the lockdown until she got home that night. She hopes she’s never in a lockdown again, but then again, doesn’t everyone wish that they are never in a lockdown.

One year at school her history teacher was telling them what to do during an emergency situation. She gave examples of times she was in actual lockdowns with armed strangers at her previous schools. She’s not even sure the teacher saw how she was affected by the stories. It was the kind of situation where she wasn’t even sure that if she had said something, the teacher would have let her leave. By the end she was crying quietly and shaking. She knew that the other kids probably saw her but at that point she didn’t really care. Her main focus was getting control of herself. Her mind had been overloaded with information she didn’t ask for and didn’t want with now way out.

She did go to a cop training example at the academy, she shot the “bad guy” with the rifle and then reloaded it. This was before the gun range, before she decided to never pick up a gun again. She didn’t even realize she reloaded it, Sara and Nyssa had to tell her. Felicity Smoak jumps the rest of the times she hears a gun go off. Sara takes Nyssa with her whenever she goes to the gun range now. She never wants to hold a gun again and her girlfriends understand.

**Author's Note:**

> Most of this is from my own experiences. I really don't like guns, and aside from hunting I don't understand why anyone needs them. Feel free to disagree with me but that is how I feel.


End file.
